\u201cIt is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,\u201d the essay says. \u201cI do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity\u2019s relevance would rush to build that future.\u201d<\/p>\n
I find it difficult to believe that Zuckerberg doesn\u2019t have Amodei\u2019s phone number. Or Altman\u2019s. I know he has Elon Musk\u2019s \u2014 I\u2019ve seen their texts in court. Perhaps he should have texted them to ask!<\/p>\n
Anyway, Zuckerberg is trying to be the soothing tech guru, here to tell us that things are going to be okay. He\u2019s addressing, however belatedly, the rage that many people feel about AI. There are sections on data centers (Meta is building power sources for some data centers in the future, but don\u2019t ask for renewable energy<\/a>) and \u201cpreventing government tyranny.\u201d This essay exists to try to quiet the AI backlash \u2014 even if it never quite says that directly.<\/p>\n Love is not just a feeling; it is a way of paying attention<\/p>\n We will leave aside the question of \u201csuperintelligence,\u201d which is Zuckerberg\u2019s preferred term for what the rest of the industry calls \u201cartificial general intelligence\u201d; let\u2019s stipulate, for the purposes of this essay, that it is indeed possible to create. I am also going to ignore the risible defense of the pervert glasses contained in this piece; they are indefensible. As for the risks, I think they are best addressed elsewhere. What I am interested in is what Zuckerberg \u2014 or whoever is writing for him \u2014 believes will improve all our lives.<\/p>\n Here is his first pitch: \u201cEveryone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24\/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.\u201d I am struck, here, by the inclusion of \u201crelationships\u201d and \u201chobbies.\u201d<\/p>\n What strengthens a relationship? Almost always, it is personal investment. Perhaps an AI agent might be better at predicting what my father will want for his birthday than I am, but it definitionally cannot give him my time and consideration. Love is not just a feeling; it is a way of paying attention.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg\u2019s vision of maximizing productivity comes at the cost of my experience<\/p>\n Zuckerberg uses an example that is telling, in a grim kind of way: He asked an AI to pick out a \u201cpersonalized\u201d recipe to bake with his daughter. He could have considered what kind of baking his daughter enjoys, what her skill set is and what he might be able to teach her, then picked a recipe. Maybe he would have picked a bad recipe, and they would have bungled it \u2014 but that might have been a fun experience and a good story. Or maybe he would have picked a family recipe, and it would have given him the opportunity to tell her about when he was a child, or what his grandmother was like. Certainly he\u2019s a busy man, but wouldn\u2019t that make the gift of his attention to her hobby even more precious? Perhaps he might have come to understand her better by spending more time thinking about what she likes. Without that attention, the baking they do together seems more focused on accomplishment than quality time.<\/p>\n Relatedly, the point of a hobby is that you do it. Granted, many of my hobbies are physical activities \u2014 hiking, running, yoga, rock climbing (with guys who make bad AI art, apparently). But an AI cannot read a book for me, because the activity of reading a book is absorbing its words into my mind; a summary doesn\u2019t do the same thing as the opening lines of Renata Adler\u2019s Speedboat: \u201cNobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written \u2014 disrupting a clich\u00e9 and, presumably, creating a genre.\u201d The summary cannot summon the mood, nor the actual pleasure of reading the words themselves. An AI cannot replicate the soothing quality of knitting my own scarf; it is the knitting itself that soothes.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg suggests that using an AI to assist me in these tasks will let me accomplish more, and that is probably the case. But I always thought the point of a hobby was to relax and enjoy myself. It\u2019s certainly not to maximize productivity. And Zuckerberg\u2019s vision of maximizing productivity comes at the cost of my experience.<\/p>\n This is the guy that had every resource anyone could wish for at his fingertips and his metaverse still flopped<\/p>\n The second thing Zuckerberg presents is \u201cEveryone will have incredible tools for creation to express your ideas.\u201d I would suggest that everyone already has incredible tools for creation to express their ideas, and that one need merely practice with those tools in order to get better at them. The pleasure of, say, learning to make a video is, first of all, making the video itself \u2014 who hasn\u2019t had fun goofing around with friends while filming? But it is also getting better at the tools one uses to make the video, and looking back at one\u2019s efforts as one\u2019s directorial eye improves. Sure, this is time-consuming and requires effort \u2014 it can\u2019t be done in a single evening \u2014 but isn\u2019t that what makes it rewarding?<\/p>\n Similarly, Zuckerberg introduces the unimpressive notion that everyone gets \u201cpowerful tools to create new businesses.\u201d This is the guy that had every resource anyone could wish for at his fingertips and his metaverse still flopped. Maybe more ideas can turn into businesses, but not every idea will be a successful business, and the sheer volume of competition may make it much harder to succeed. That is, assuming those powerful tools work as promised. After all, just recently, Meta announced that its AI had hacked another company<\/a>, following similar incidents from OpenAI and Anthropic. Not only will your own personal company have to deal with such hackers, you may inadvertently engage in corporate espionage yourself. Is that really what every entrepreneur wants to sign up for?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s move on to the next absurd idea the manifesto introduces: Everyone gets a \u201cpersonalized tutor and coach with a PhD in every subject.\u201d Again, for the sake of this essay, pretend that is possible. We have already tried computerized learning, in 2020, and if I recall correctly, it was a spectacular failure. People don\u2019t like it. Kids don\u2019t like it. Teachers are still coping with the fallout. And I hate to do another victory lap on behalf of Aristotle, but it sure seems like having a mentor (phronimos) is really important when it comes to learning, ethical or otherwise. The social part of learning \u2014 whether that\u2019s the peer pressure of being in a class, or the need to impress someone you admire \u2014 seems indispensable to the experience.<\/p>\n Everyone is equal in AI but some people (the ones with money) are more equal than others<\/p>\n The strongest thing that Zuckerberg suggests, in my view, is the notion that everyone can benefit from and contribute to scientific advances. Now, I benefited from the polio vaccine \u2014 among other scientific advances \u2014 at least in part because Jonas Salk chose to make it available to everyone<\/a> without earning any money from it. But never mind that. I am curious about what it means to contribute to scientific advances in this sense.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg gives some vague handwaving about personalized therapies, which have long been a goal in medicine. Again, let\u2019s assume AI can even do this. I notice, however, that personalization is possible only when doctors have enough time to actually listen to their patients. It also means that patients will need to have the means to pay for personalized medicine, whether through their insurance or otherwise. But this bit from the essay is vague enough that he may actually mean that AI will allow researchers to harvest samples from all of us and test things more quickly, which has its own haunting privacy implications, especially coming from Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n For his final point, Zuckerberg outlines the current state of affairs: Everyone is equal in AI but some people (the ones with money) are more equal than others. The best models will remain paywalled, accessible only to the rich. But what if everyone had free access, he wonders. You mean like they do right now, Mark? How on earth does making the status quo permanent improve our lives?<\/p>\n Consider all this against Terence Tao\u2019s narrower vision<\/a> of what AI is for in mathematics. He asks us to imagine the following statement is true: \u201cAI tools will, reasonably soon, become capable of performing a reasonable fraction of research-level mathematical tasks, with reasonable levels of success, quality, supervision, and cost.\u201d Tao then stops and asks a crucial question: What are our goals?<\/p>\n I am coming to believe we need a better quality of AI booster<\/p>\n It is the question that Zuckerberg\u2019s vision of the future doesn\u2019t ask. For each thing Zuckerberg outlines as a possibility, the presumed outcome is some kind of accomplishment. The possibility of pleasure, of experience, of self-knowledge or self-expression are missing from this vision.<\/p>\n In contrast, one of the possibilities Tao outlines for the field of mathematics \u2014 if an AI can simply solve mathematical problems at will \u2014 is that its goal is to help people understand and do math. This accomplishment is perhaps somewhat squishier than \u201csolve a problem,\u201d but only because it is more profound. It speaks to what we understand knowledge to be: not merely the collection of answers to questions, but the understanding of why those are the answers \u2014 a deeper way of connecting with the world and with ourselves. This sounds suspiciously like the humanities, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n Look, I am coming to believe we need a better quality of AI booster, because while I understand the Zuckerberg statement exists mostly to cheerlead Meta\u2019s own AI investment, I have heard similar things coming from people who don\u2019t have similar financial interests. Is the point of life merely to stockpile accomplishments? If that is what Silicon Valley believes, no wonder all the billionaires seem so unhappy all the time! They have traded experience for accomplishment, and cheated themselves out of their own lives in the process. They keep chasing more money and more power, because they think that will finally be enough \u2014 but as long as they do not experience things themselves, nothing will ever be enough.<\/p>\n What does it mean to live a good life?<\/p>\n When I am reading a book, or listening to music, or watching a movie, I am not just consuming a resource. I am experiencing other people\u2019s minds. Artists have signature styles not merely as branding exercises but because they are expressing something about how they view the world, what they think beauty is, and what they believe to be the point of art. In prose, word choices are a kind of thumbprint for a specific person. In music, phrasing is another. In visual art, brush or pen strokes. Part of the point of the encounter is the aesthetic vision; the quality of another person\u2019s attention. Part of it is your own attention: Does the artist\u2019s aesthetic speak to you? What have you learned about your own aesthetics from it? What does beauty mean to you? What is pleasure?<\/p>\n If AI can do all the things we are promised it will do \u2014 hardly a given, but stick with me \u2014 then we are left with a question: What does using it accomplish? If you do not have to pay attention or do work to meet your goal, does your goal mean anything at all? In some ways, that throws us back to some of the oldest and most profound questions our species has encountered: What does it mean to live a good life? How do we love others? What does it mean to love ourselves?<\/p>\n Which brings me back to my climbing buddy\u2019s motivational poster. What is there to say about something he did not create? It expresses very little of him. It took only seconds and required no attention, devotion, or even thought. 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